Soft Manipulation
Soft Hands represent a departure from traditional robot hand design, which often focuses on precise models and planning of contact points. Instead, our approach emphasizes robustness and safety through the use of soft materials and flexible mechanics. This softness allows us to leverage contact with the environment and use it for effective grasping and manipulation strategies. Our research explores hand design, the integration of sensors in soft hands, and feedback control methods for grasping and in-hand manipulation that take advantage of the hands' morphological properties. Furthermore, we view soft hands as a computational resource that can support robust manipulation behavior generation. This requires a balance between the software that controls the hand and the morphological computation provided by the body, leading to the problem of how to efficiently co-design body and control.
RBO Hand 3
© RBO
The RBO Hand 3 is a highly dexterous and versatile soft hand based on pneumatic actuation. It advances on its predecessor by combining 16 actuated degrees of freedom with intrinsic mechanical compliance in an anthropomorphic design. Special attention was paid to the design of the opposable thumb. The RBO Hand 3 is inherently safe and highly robust for externsive real-world experimentation. It closely replicates the functioning of its human counterpart to facilitate transfer of insights to human dexterity, and it is capable of dexterous grasping and manipulation
The RBO Hand 3 has been featured on the cover of National Geographic and the Soft Robotics Journal.
If you want to build your own RH3, you are welcome to do so. We have published the entire production process here.
© RBO
© RBO
Co-Design
The behavior of a robotic agent is determined by its control program, shape and material composition, as well as external factors from its environment. Both control and morphology affect the behavior and thus must be chosen carefully to ensure robust and general behavior in various operating environments. Thus, given a set of tasks, control and morphology must be considered as one combined aspect in designing soft robots. Moreover, we can divide responsibilities into morphology and control simultaneously and synergistically to ensure robust behavior in the physical world. This joint programming of morphology and control is called co-design.
RBO Hand 2
© RBO
The RBO Hand 2 is a hand made from PneuFlex actuators mounted on a flexible, printed scaffold. The hand was developed to investigate the capabilities and limits of hands when relying only on soft, deformable structures. The unique deformability provides several advantageous benefits to robots trying to interact with the environment:
- very robust against blunt collisions
- very low impact energies
- passively compliant fingers and palm decouple contact from the robot arm, stabilizing force control
- mechanical adaptability to object shapes simplifies finger control
- the pneumatic actuation makes it easy to create complex hand and actuator geometries
The result of our research are several hand prototypes, which we refer to collectively as Soft Hands. RBO Hand 2 is the latest model and used in our lab for research into grasping strategies.
If you want to build your own, you are welcome to do so! We have published the CAD models for the PneuFlex actuators
RBO Hand 1
© RBO
The RBO Hand (published in 2013) was the first soft hand that employed PneuFlex actuators. It uses 3 pairs of parallel and straight PneuFlex actuators. The finger are also partially connected to each other. The hand has a passively bendable rubber sheet acting as a palm in opposition to the fingers.
Pneumatic Box
© RBO
For the control of the pneumatic RBO Hand 2 we had to create our own hardware. We developed the "PneumaticBox", which consists of valve array, a single-board computer, and a custom printed circuit board.
A detailed description of the hard- and software can be found in the Tutorial section.
PneuFlex Actuators
© RBO
We develop a set of production processes and a complete design toolchain for soft continuum actuators under the name PneuFlex. The toolchain consists of several components:
- A unified process to create PneuFlex actuators of diverse shape from a given mold
- A method to automatically create PneuFlex molds from a parametric description of shape.
- A method to automatically create PneuFlex molds from a description of mechanical parameters
- A system to simulate a PneuFlex actuator or to simulate arrangements of actuators (i.e. soft hands)
- A pneumatic control hardware tailored to the requirements of finger-size soft continuum actuators
- Controllers to enable complex, synchronized actuation across PneuFlex actuators
Human & Robot Grasping
© RBO
We study human grasping under a variety of conditions in order to identify and characterize different grasping strategies. Specially, we are interested in strategies that are robust to be performed under different kinds of impairment, e.g. visual. Our final goal, is to transfer those robust strategies to a robot. In addition to subjects' grasping with their natural hands, we also observe them when they use soft robotic hands such as RBO Hand 2 and Pisa/IIT Hand. Our goal is to leverage their intuition in grasping to understand how robotic hands can be controlled and evaluate the transfer of their strategies to robotic hands.
Perception and Planning of Grasps
© RBO
Our approach to grasping is motivated by the fact that humans don't avoid contact with the environment but rather exploit it to generate haptic feedback complementing visual feedback. This exploitation of environmental constraints simplifies the grasping problem by converting a high-dimensional configuration search problem into successive local searches guided by these environmental constraints, such as surfaces or edges.
We are developing algorithms that model the environment as a collection of environmental constraints which can be used to generate reactive feedback plans that lead to robust and reliable grasps.
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy - EXC 2002/1 "Science of Intelligence" - project number 390523135
German Priority Program DFG-SPP 2100 “Soft Material Robotic Systems” - project number 405033880.
Soft Manipulation (SoMa) - funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 program, award number 645599, May 2015 - April 2019.
Alexander von Humboldt professorship - awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation and funded through the Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF, July 2009 - June 2014
Publications
2022
RBO Hand 3: A Platform for Soft Dexterous Manipulation
IEEE Transactions on Robotics :1-16
April 2022
ISSN: 1941-0468
2021
Surprisingly Robust In-Hand Manipulation: An Empirical Study
Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems
Publisher: Virtual
July 2021
2014
A Novel Type of Compliant, Underactuated Robotic Hand for Dexterous Grasping
Robotics:Science and Systems (RSS)
2014
2013
A Compliant Hand Based on a Novel Pneumatic Actuator
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Page 2047–2053
May 2013
